Last
October, while a California court was busy enforcing a surrogate
motherhood
contract, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC)
was
busy trying to persuade a Royal Commission that surrogacy contracts
should
not be enforceable in Canada.

To
me, the California court was on the right track. Doesn't it seem
fitting
somehow that people who value babies more than money should get the
babies,
while people who value money more than babies should get the
money?

Of
course, the NAC was not simply arguing that surrogates should win in
court
whenever they change their minds. They went much further, calling for
an
outright ban on surrogacy contracts and criminal penalties for
intermediaries
who arrange diem.

People
seem to fear that if we allowed the "buying" of babies, purchasers
would
buy them for all sorts of dubious purposes--that we would be
sanctioning
something akin to slavery.

But
being a parent has never meant that you own your baby. A birth mother
can't
enslave, torture or murder her child. All she has the right to do is to
act as a parent--to provide care and try to establish a rewarding
relationship.
If she chooses to give up her rights as a parent, whether for cash or
otherwise,
all she can transfer are the rights that she herself had.

In
any event, there's no reason to believe that people who commission the
production of a baby are any more likely to want it for evil or
sadistic
purposes than people who have children naturally. If anything, the
contrary
is probably true. People tend to take better care of something when
they've
had to make sacrifices to get it.

We
seem to have a double standard when it comes to paying for the
production
of babies: it's okay for the state to do it, but not for private
individuals.
There were no protests when the government of Quebec announced that it
would pay parents $6,000 per child for third, fourth, fifth and
umpteenth
children. It's a safe bet that over the course of their lifetimes, the
state will take more out of those misbegotten babies than any set of
commissioning
parents ever would.

The
NAC's hostility toward surrogacy and other reproductive technologies
such
as in vitro fertilization arises, says their Royal Commission brief,
because
such technologies represent "an extension of the marketplace right
inside
the human body." Unfortunately, they never bother to explain why that
notion
is so terrible.

I
think what's terrible is that the NAC considers the marketplace to be a
self-evident evil, instead of the force for progress, well-being and
self-determination
it really is.

They
argue that we don't allow the sale of blood or body parts in Canada,
and
recommend that this prohibition be extended to sperm, ova and embryos.
Those, they say, must be "donated as a gift, to be stored by a public
agency
for the use of those who need them, not sold to the highest
bidder."

This
ignores the tragic fact that there are chronic shortages of blood and
body
parts in Canada--shortages that might be alleviated, saving untold
misery,
if donors (including the families of deceased persons) could be offered
cash inducements.

Yes,
there are places in the world where blood is purchased and sold, and
one
of the problems is that money attracts vendors whose blood may be
diseased
or drugged. This hazard is certainly reduced with donated blood.

But
there are other ways of reducing the hazard. One is to permit the
development
of commercial ventures that have a financial incentive to screen their
products for quality. A commercial blood bank would have a reputation
to
preserve and liability-insurance premiums to pay. They'd go broke
quickly
if their products weren't safe.

Commercial
sperm and egg banks, and surrogate contract brokers, could offer
similar
protection both to purchasers and suppliers, because a good reputation
ensures more business. By handling a large volume of cases, they could
screen out potential problems much more effectively than an individual
could hope to do on his own.

The
NAC invoke the spectre of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in their
argument
against in vitro fertilization. Could they really have missed the whole
point of the book? The evil depicted by Huxley was not that babies were
fertilized in test tubes, but that an all-powerful government
controlled
the process, deciding who lived, who died, and everything in between.
By
proposing to make "a public agency" the sole repository of reproductive
technology, the NAC are begging for Huxley's nightmare to come
true.

Would
anyone really trust the government with this function? This is the same
bunch of hypocrites who gave us "free" universal medicate, then set up
a cozy private clinic for themselves so they wouldn't have to wait in
the
inevitable line-ups with the hoi polloi. Will the top bureaucrats be
the
first to use the reproductive technologies they'd make it illegal for
the
rest of us to buy?

Unlike
the NAC, my vision of the future is neither Brave New World nor
Margaret
Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. It's Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh
Mistress.
The heroine, a moon colonist and professional host mother, leads a
successful
revolution--in her spare time--against a tyrannical earth government
that
has been throttling the moon's free marketplace.